Sharing
Prosperity And Power:
A New Partnership For The New Millenniumby Nancy Birdsall
Executive Vice President, Inter-American Development Bank

Remarks
At The Fourth World Conference On Women, Action for Equality, Development
and Peace, Beijing, China: September 4-15, 1995

On
behalf of the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, Mr. Enrique
Iglesias, who is here with me today, and the forty-six member countries
of the Inter-American Development Bank, I am honored to address this distinguished
gathering.

I
am speaking today not only as a development banker, but as a woman. It
is a special pleasure for me, as the first woman with the rank of executive
vice president in any of the "multilateral" development banks,
to address this world conference. I doubt I would be standing here today
if there had not been an international woman's movement, if there had
not been world conferences in Mexico City, in Copenhagen, in Nairobi and
in thousands of other fora between and since. My presence here today shows
that there has been progress; it is possible for women to rise to positions
of power. But it also reminds me that there are still too few women at
high levels in international organizations; I have had over the years
too few female colleagues at any level, given there are so many women
with the necessary skills, commitment and experience.

The
presence here today of both President Iglesias and myself, the Bank's
two highest-ranking officials, signals the full commitment of our member
countries and of our institution to gender equality in our own institution
and in the Latin American and Caribbean region. With a loan portfolio
of over 20 billion dollars, and annual commitments of six billion dollars
to our borrowing members, the IDB is the largest of the regional development
banks and one of the premier international development institutions working
in Latin America and the Caribbean. But as President Iglesias has said
so well, the IDB is more than a bank with financial resources. It is a
bank with a soul. We are committed to using our resources to support and
catalyze the development process in all its dimensions, including social,
intellectual, cultural as well as economic development. A central aspect
of our broad vision of development is our dedication to support equal
partnership between women and men as participants in the process of development.

World
conferences such as this are easy to criticize. But they can be a useful
vehicle, through discussion, debate, even through disagreement, for informing
and educating and convincing ourselves, of what should and can be done.
I am convinced that this world conference will make a difference. I assure
you that this conference and all the events surrounding it are already
inspiring us at the IDB to a renewed and expanded commitment to the agenda
contained in the Platform for Action.

I
want to spend the next few minutes sharing with you our vision in the
IDB of how men and women, as full partners in the development challenge,
can share equally in prosperity and power in the Latin America and Caribbean
region. I will speak about three Ps: partnership, prosperity and power.

Partnership
Means Putting Men Back in the Family

Let
me begin with partnership. This is a conference about women. But a full
partnership of women and men requires a rethinking of men's as well as
women's role in society.

Women
in the Latin American and Caribbean region have always been productive
workers on farms and in informal urban businesses. Now, in addition, women
make up 30 percent of the formal labor force, double the rate of one generation
ago. But the roles of men have not changed commensurately. Fathers in
Latin America contribute only about one-fifth as much time as mothers
to the care of their children--one of the lowest ratios of any region
in the world. Too many fathers, feeling restricted to a narrow family
role as breadwinner, see themselves as failures if even temporarily they
cannot provide adequately for their family's economic needs. In parts
of Latin America and the Caribbean region, during the economic decline
of the 1980s, many fathers tragically abandoned their pregnant partners
and their children, adding to the numbers and poverty of female-headed
households.

The
development challenge is all about making better lives for our children.
We as women cannot do it alone. Children benefit from the emotional as
well as financial support of their fathers; behind every mother truly
liberated to contribute to development outside the home is likely to be
a father, uncle or male colleague who has been liberated to contribute
inside the home. In such countries as Colombia or Guatemala, studies of
how men and women use their time suggest women have systematically more
work and less leisure than men. The same is true all over the developed
world. The problem is not that women are entering the paid labor force,
nor that women have more apparent choices; it is that men are not encouraged
to engage in the real work of raising children, and thus seem to have
too few choices.

Worst
of all, public policy, except in a few countries of Scandinavia, fails
to support an expanded role for men in the family. Government programs
and policies that affect employment, child care, and pensions, are still
largely shaped by gender stereotypes that fail to support the emotional
responsibility of men to their families, exacting a heavy toll not only
on men and women but on their children.

To
address this problem in Latin America, the Inter-American Development
Bank is working with member governments to develop and support programs
and policies, in education, health, training, social insurance, child
care and employment, that explicitly support an expanded role for men
in the family. We hope that the Platform of Action coming out of this
conference will provide ample reinforcement for this direction in our
region.

The
second P is prosperity. After a long period of stagnation and decline,
our region is experiencing renewed growth. Government leaders have sponsored
courageous economic reforms. They have reduced inflation dramatically
with heavy doses of fiscal and monetary discipline. They have carried
out fundamental structural reforms, including trade liberalization, tax
reform, and privatizations that have reduced the fiscal burden of subsidizing
inefficient state-owned enterprises. Investments and exports are increasing,
and private capital is flowing into the region. The structural reforms
have enabled the countries of the region to weather the financial storm
set off by last December's devaluation of its currency in Mexico.

These
economic reforms and the growth they are bringing are absolutely necessary
for the reduction of widespread poverty and deep inequalities in the region.
But they are far from sufficient. Our member countries of Latin America
are now making substantial commitments to policies and programs to more
directly reduce poverty and attack inequality. They are, with the support
of the Inter-American Development Bank, committed to ensuring that structural
reforms are designed to minimize negative effects on the poor, and including
programs to explicitly protect the poor when necessary. They are committed
to maximizing the productivity-enhancing effects for the poor of credit
programs for small "entrepreneurs" and of investments in education,
health, and infrastructure.

Obviously
a concern with reducing poverty requires attention to women. Poverty in
Latin America and the Caribbean, indeed throughout the Americas, has emerged
as a markedly feminine phenomenon. Most of the poor in our region are
women and children. A quarter of households are headed by women (in some
countries almost half of households) and of these, most are poor. Because
women are poor and so many are household heads, in some countries more
than 50 percent of children are growing up poor.

This
is not primarily a problem of education. With the worrisome exception
of women in the indigenous communities of Latin America, where female
illiteracy still exceeds male illiteracy, women in our region now have
virtually equal access to basic education. It is a problem of equal access
to jobs and credit, and equal pay for equal work. Women are more likely
to be unemployed than men in Latin America. They are systematically less
likely to have the contacts, the collateral and in some countries, the
legal standing, to get access to commercial bank credits. When employed
they earn just 75 percent of what men earn.

Ironically,
even as women are the principal victims of poverty, they are also the
great multipliers of prosperity. We know from careful research that women
spend more of their personal income on their children than men, and that
a mother's education has a more powerful influence on children's education
than a father's. Improving women's access to jobs, to credit and to equal
pay is not only just and fair, a legitimate objective of development in
itself. It also makes perfectly good economic sense--because the benefits
will spread beyond the family to all of society and to the next generation.

I
want to mention three types of programs the IDB is supporting to address
the constraints to women's prosperity, and thus to prosperity for all,
in our borrowing member countries.

One
is microenterprise development. The IDB has for two decades provided support
for microenterprise credit programs of non-governmental organizations.
More than half the beneficiaries of these programs, of which there are
now several million people, have been women; many are managed by women
and women's organizations. Thousands of these groups are now receiving
support from the IDB, including through a special facility to finance
our equity participation in these ventures, to become full-fledged financial
institutions in their countries, able to raise as well as lend resources.

A
second is vocational training. Recent loans to Argentina and Chile have
included components to ensure that women are encouraged to take training
in skills that are highly marketable but have traditionally been confined
to men, such as plumbing, carpentry, and electrical work. These programs
also include day care and other promotional activities targeted to women.
In Chile 45 percent of the participants in this program to date have been
women.

The
third area is child development. We are expanding our efforts to develop
and support comprehensive child care programs, which benefit not only
children, but help women balance their responsibilities for raising children
with their need to work and their efforts to participate in political
and civic life. New programs are being designed and executed in Nicaragua,
Bolivia and Peru. Over the last four years we have made special efforts
to ensure that gender concerns are an integral part of all the programs
we support and all the policies we recommend--through our dialogue with
borrowing members on economic policy, and in the context of our lending
for agriculture, infrastructure and urban development as well as for education,
health and family planning. In 1991, the first year for which such statistics
were kept, only 6 percent of our mainstream loan projects included specific
actions to address gender differences and strengthen women's participation
in projects. By 1994 that share has risen to 31 percent. We are committed
to pushing that share to 50 percent by the year 2000.

Power
for Women is Key to Real Development

The
third P is power--power for women in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Development in our region cannot happen unless women have more power over
their own lives and more influence in shaping the policies and programs
that affect everyone's lives. Too many women compared with men are poor
and on their own to continue to rely on trickle-down within families to
ensure prosperity for all. Women are too central as mothers and multipliers
of development for development to occur in the absence of their fullest
possible contribution.

Women's
full contribution to development can only be tapped when they can participate
as equally powerful partners, with men, in all aspects of economic and
political life. Participation without equal access to leadership and power
will not bring development progress.

I
am not among those women who say that powerful women will become mere
mirrors of powerful men. Women with power in Latin America are already
making a distinct contribution to political and civic life, and to shaping
of economic and social policies. The strengthening of democracy throughout
the region and the increasing reliance of democratic governments on institutions
of civil society are rapidly creating new leadership opportunities for
women. But women have a long way to go. Women participate in significant
numbers in political parties and labor unions, but rarely as leaders.
Only a few women have achieved top political positions, and a few others
stand out as social activists and business leaders. Women occupy only
5 to 8 percent of positions in the region's legislative assemblies, and
women in the executive branch of government are concentrated in the social
ministries, and largely excluded from the political, economic, judicial,
and defense spheres. Encouragingly for the future, women's influence is
greater through nontraditional channels, such as the fast growing movement
of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In our region, women also increased
their representation among managers and administrators from 18 percent
in 1980 to 25 percent in 1990.

To
support the movement for greater leadership of women in political and
civic life, the IDB in collaboration with other donors, is launching a
Fund for Women's Leadership and Representation. The Fund will finance
programs of nongovernmental organizations leadership training and capacity
building for nongovernmental organizations. The IDB also supports legal
reform and civic education to reduce gender inequity through programs
such as the Technical Cooperation Program for Governance, now being prepared
in Bolivia.

And
within the IDB itself in this year of the Beijing conference, the President
has asked for new actions to increase the participation of women in our
own management ranks. Eight percent of our sector are now managed by women,
compared to 2 percent 10 years ago. We know we cannot be a truly effective
development institution until we have more women in our own senior decision-making
positions.

Finally,
the Bank is seeking to address one of the most intractable forms of unequal
power--the threat of physical violence against women. Together with the
Pan American Health Organization, we are designing a regional program
to treat and prevent violence against women through legal reform to punish
offenders, training of medical personnel, public education campaigns,
and programs to assist victims to rebuild their lives.

Development
is About Our Children

I
want to end on a personal note. Development is about the future, and thus
about our children and our young people. Today's youth are the ones who
will determine what the tomorrow of the 21st century will look like. With
that in mind, the IDB has sponsored a youth delegation to this world conference
on women, made up of one young woman from each of our borrowing member
countries. Over the last few days, I have had the chance to interact with
these remarkable young people and to take inspiration from their energy,
creativity and commitment. They have reminded me that I am not only a
development banker and a woman. I am also a mother, deeply concerned with
the future of my own children, and the shape of the future world in which
they live most of their lives. Many of us in this room will not live to
see the changes we have been speaking about here and working for in each
of our home settings. But the young members of the IDB's youth delegation,
and all of our own children, can live to see those changes - if we commit
ourselves now to a full partnership between equally powerful men and women
that will endure into the next millennium. I feel fortunate, as a woman
and a mother, to work in an institution and in a region of the world dedicated
to that mission and that partnership, and to know that I and the institution
I work for can be part of this historic process.

Sources: Speech can
also be found at <http://www.un.org/esa/gopher-data/conf/fwcw/conf/una/950912192845.txt>.